Collecting soft voices...

“Unfaithfulness in public stations is deeply criminal.

But there is not encouragement to be faithful.

Neither profit, nor honor, nor applause is

acquired by faithfulness…virtue is not

in fashion. Vice is not infamous…’

– John Adams, 2^nd President of the

United States: Letter to wife Abigail.

How many times has someone given you assurances they would do something and did not follow through? How often has someone tried to sell, or succeeded in selling you something that did not meet expectations? How many times have you been betrayed in your life?

How good did it feel?

A small example…

Some years ago we purchased a new car. After a fair amount of dealership visiting, question asking and test driving, we settled on a particular make and model. It also indicated good gas mileage. We bought it because it was a good fit. The promise of thirty-two miles per gallon was not the deciding factor, but in addition to liking the vehicle, it made us feel we were a little more environmentally responsible.

From the beginning, that car never got thirty-two miles per gallon (mpg). Even on long highway stretches using economy settings and riding gently downward sloping roads, we never got that kind of efficiency.

Because the expectation was set, and for a while, each time the tank was filled and the car got twenty-eight mpg, I was irritated for having been misled.

It’s not the mpg's…

It may only have been a car company/salesman adjusting mileage predictions to sweeten a sale….so what's the big deal?

Were it only companies selling cars.

When these things happen, they erode confidence in information sources. Not only for gas mileage, as in this circumstance, but a broader, subtle distrust of information we hear from many sources about many things. As more of these kinds of experiences happen, they shave millimeters of hope and faith from the edges of our minds. If they happen enough, they wear away the fabric of social trust. Like the frog placed in slowly heating water, changes happen so insidiously that we don’t notice our shifting perceptions and beliefs. As with the frog who does not recognize he is being cooked, slowly emerging realities have potentially dangerous implications.

Dean Acheson, an American Statesman who provided counsel to several American Presidents, said:

“For a long time we have gone along with some well-tested principles of conduct: that it was better to tell the truth than falsehoods; that a half-truth was no truth at all; that duties were older than and as fundamental as rights; that, as Justice Holmes put it, the mode by which the inevitable came to pass was effort; that to perpetuate a harm was always wrong, no matter how many joined in it, but to perpetuate it on a weaker person was particularly detestable ... Our institutions are founded on the assumption that most people will follow these principles most of the time because they want to, and the institutions work pretty well when this assumption is true…” (From speech at the Associated Harvard Clubs of Boston – 1946)

These are time tested words because they are resonant truths. Our American way of life is messy, but in its messiness, has provided a compelling ‘light on the hill’ that has drawn the hopeful to its shores for more than 200 years. It has been an awkward experiment, but one that has worked better – and on a scale – than any other system the world has known.

Clarion? Call?…

Each of us has a very small circle of influence in our lives. The most fundamental of which is the potential for self-control. It is here where faith, curiosity, and hope exists, driving us forward. After that is influence with our family, then friends. As the concentric circles expand, our impact diminishes dramatically – neighborhood, community, state, nation, and the world. With each outward step, the ‘sound of our voice’ becomes softer and more distant.

On the other hand, as Pope Francis said in a 2017 TED talk, when distant individual voices unite with other voices of hope, they provide the basis for a revolution of light that has always been the basis of communal (community) and societal resilience. 

Do unto others – you know…

It is easier to consider ‘returning in kind’  things that have been done to us (e.g. let down, misled, or betrayed). The problem is that one can never pay back the hurt and even the score. Pay back only doubles the hurt – to the aphorism "When you remain angry with the thief, he has stolen from you twice."

It is also easy to fall into the mindset that since everyone does it, it's okay to adjust the truth a little here and a little there for personal gain. No doubt all of us do this from time to time, for any number of reasons. But repeated unfettered selfishness is a cancer that destroys our character and on a larger scale is a very real threat to our way of life.

Why not simply withdraw, step away and let the societal waters slowly heat. After all, it is them…those people…the others…who initiate these problems – not us. The thing is there is no them and us. There is only us. When ‘they’ do hurtful things, we are in the same heating water. It is the collective of the faint voices of the common good that cool the temperatures and still the waters.

As Dean Acheson and Pope Francis alluded to, stability in our own and societal lives can only come when we come together in the common cause of truth, hope, faith, and love. These are the glue that holds our personal and collective lives together making us stronger.

Maybe “…everyone else is doing it, why not me?” is an easier path in the short run, but over time, consistency, honesty, and character will come to a grinding halt. 

Listen for the voices, keep the faith...

- ted